Installation Guide

This install guide covers the following types of installations:

Installing Distributions

Binary Distribution

The binary distribution of Pluto is packaged with Tomcat (currently version 5.0.28). Pluto leverages Tomcat to provide the web container in which the Pluto portlet container executes. The binary distribution includes the Pluto Portlet Container, The Portal Driver, and Pluto Testsuite.

To install the binary distribution:

  • Download the current binary distribution of Pluto
  • Extract the binary distribution to a directory from here forward refered to as "<PLUTO_HOME>".
  • Startup the server by using the appropriate tomcat startup script located at <PLUTO_HOME>/bin. For *nix use startup.sh; for windows use startup.bat.
  • Point your browser to The Pluto Driver and your ready to go!

Library Distributions

The pluto library distributions are packaged to allow integration with an external portal server.

To install the library distributions to your portal server:

    Ensure that the pluto-x.x.x.jar is loaded by a classloader to which both the portal and portlet application web apps have access.

Source Distribution

Installing the source distribution requires the most effort, and is recomended only for those individuals who are interested in modifying the container. The source distribution is basically a snapshot of the source code repository at a given time. Because of this, please see the build instructions, which will provide information about how to build Pluto from scratch.

To install the source distribution into tomcat:

  • Install Java 1.3 or greater
  • Install Maven 1.0 or greater
  • Install Tomcat 4.x or Tomcat 5.x to a directory from here forward refered to as <TOMCAT_HOME>
  • Edit your <PLUTO_HOME>/build.properties to include the following properties:
    PropertyValueExample(s)
    maven.tomcat.homeTomcat Installation Directory\\usr\\local\\jakarta-tomcat.5.0.27, c:\\jakarta-tomcat.5.0.27
    maven.tomcat.version.majorTomcat Major Version Number5
  • From <PLUTO_HOME> issue the command: 'maven fullDeployment'
  • Startup the server by using the appropriate tomcat startup script located at <PLUTO_HOME>/bin. For *nix use startup.sh; for windows use startup.bat.
  • Point your browser to The Pluto Driver and your ready to go!

Installing Portlets

Currently, to automate the deployment/installation of portlets you must utilize the source distribution of pluto.

In order to deploy a portlet application to pluto, you must follow the steps below:

  • Assemble your portlet application into a valid war.
  • Run the maven deploy goal on your war

    This can be done by:

    maven deploy -Ddeploy=/MyPathToMyPortlet/target/MyPortlet.war

    See the Building From Source document for detailed instructions.

  • Alternatively, there is an interactive ant script in the portlet-deploy directory that will perform the same task as the Maven deployment goal.

  • Modify the Portlet Entity Registry and the Page Registry files. These configuration files are located at:
          [portal-home]/WEB-INF/data/portletentityregistry.xml
    
          [portal-home]/WEB-INF/data/pageregistry.xml
    

    The Portlet entity registry file requires that you specify an application and a Portlet ID for your new Portlet. The Application ID must be unique. It also needs to know the name of the Portlet so that it can go out and find it in the webapps path. Furthermore, this information is used to map the Portlet name to the appropriate class path for loading the class. The following is an example of some additions you can make to the entity registry file:

    <application id="6">
      <definition-id>MyPortlet</definition-id>
      <portlet id="1">
          <definition-id>MyPortlet.MyPortlet</definition-id>
      </portlet>
    </application>
    

    The page registry provides Pluto with the layout information for your Portlet. The names used in the fragments must be unique as done in the following example:

    <fragment name="MyPortlet" type="page">
      <navigation>
        <title>My First Portlet</title>
        <description>...</description>
      </navigation>
    
      <fragment name="row3" type="row">
        <fragment name="col3" type="column">
          <fragment name="p4" type="portlet">
            <property name="portlet" value="6.1"/>
          </fragment>
        </fragment>
      </fragment>